Prior research on “strategic voting” has reached the conclusion that unanimity rule is uniquely bad: it results in destruction of information, and hence makes voters worse off. We show that this conclusion depends critically on the assumption that the issue being voted on is exogenous, i.e.,...

In this paper we present a structural approach to the study of government formation in multi-party parliamentary democracies. The approach is based on the estimation of a stochastic bargaining model which we use to investigate the effects of specific institutional features of parliamentary...

We analyze a legislative bargaining game over an ideological and a distributive issue. Legislators are privately informed about their ideological positions. Communication takes place before a proposal is offered and majority rule voting determines the outcome. We compare the outcome of the...

Do mandatory spending programs such as Medicare improve efficiency? We analyze a model with two parties allocating a fixed budget to a public good and private transfers each period over an infinite horizon. We compare two institutions that differ in whether public good spending is discretionary...

It is commonly believed that, since unanimity rule safeguards the rights of each individual, it protects minorities from the possibility of expropriation, thus yielding more equitable outcomes than majority rule. We show that this is not necessarily the case in bargaining environments. We study...

We study a model of sequential bargaining in which, in each period before an agreement is reached, the proposerʼs identity is randomly determined, the proposer suggests a division of a pie of size one, each other agent either approves or rejects the proposal, and the proposal is implemented if...

We analyze a three-player legislative bargaining game over an ideological and a distributive decision. Legislators are privately informed about their ideological intensities, i.e., the weight placed on the ideological decision relative to the weight placed on the distributive decision....

We analyze a legislative bargaining game over an ideological and a distributive issue. Legislators are privately informed about their ideological positions. Communication takes place before a proposal is offered and majority-rule voting determines the outcome. We compare the outcome of the...

We study the possibility of trade for purely informational reasons. We depart from previous analyses (e.g. Grossman and Stiglitz (1980) [22] and Milgrom and Stokey (1982) [32]) by allowing the final payoff of the asset being traded to depend on an action taken by its eventual owner. We...